Grounding Transnational Communication Flows in Global Contexts: Emerging Research From Metropolitan Miami

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The rapidly increasing connectivity of the digital age combined with socio-political and economic disruptions of neoliberal governance that emphasizes free trade, deregulation, privatization, and securitization have led to complicated new realities for the world’s migrant populations and the cities they inhabit. Metropolitan regions like Miami, which through a confluence of history, politics, and geography serve as key intersections for the movement of economic, cultural, and human resources that are helping to define late capitalism, provide unique opportunities for communication researchers interested in understanding the origins, impact, and outcomes of transnational activity.

This panel brings together researchers whose diverse interests include media coverage of vulnerable migrant populations facing sea level rise, the maintenance of emotional security through the consumption of immigrant media, the development of hemispheric media systems focused on pan-Latino/Hispanic audiences, and the complex narratives of human geography that emerge within the urban core of global cities. However, the connective tissue tying these projects together is that they take their cue from Miami as a site of transnational research. Miami-Dade County (pop. 2.5 million), which includes the City of Miami and 34 additional municipalities, as well as large swaths of heavily populated unincorporated areas, has the second largest immigrant population of any U.S. county (1.2 million), after Los Angeles County, and the greatest percentage of inhabitants born outside of the United States (49.50%). At the same time, Miami-Dade is headquarters for transnational corporations with banking and commerce interests in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as a production center for Spanish-language media and news outlets, including the two most prominent US networks: Univision and Telemundo.

Researchers on this panel seeks to address some key, but underexplored, questions surrounding scholarship focused on transnational media and communication: How can empirical communication research grounded in particular geographic contexts create stronger conceptualizations of transnational phenomena? To what degree can such research disambiguate meanings of transnationalism that have been possibly applied too widely? And how can communication research contribute to larger, multidisciplinary efforts at understanding key social phenomena as societies are reshaped by globalization in the 21st Century?

In metropolitan Miami, the confluence of migration, economics, and media production, along with the region’s unique geography, environmental challenges, and conservative local and state governments that prioritize commerce, development, and free-market policies, have created a rich research environment, one that offers multiple avenues of inquiry as panelists seek out answers to these questions.

Sub Unit

• Ethnicity and Race in Communication

Individual Presentations

• Mediated Belonging and the Security of Home 
 - Sallie L. Hughes, U of Miami

• Nocturnal Geosemiotics of Forced Migration: The Gentrification of Miami’s Wynwood Arts District - Moses A Shumow, Florida International University; Robert Gutsche Jr, Florida International U

• Engines and Hinges: The Latin America Indie Producers’ Role in the Network Cities of System of Telenovela Production - Juan Pinon, New York U

• The Emperor Has No Clothes: Comparing South Florida Spanish-Language and Cuban Media Coverage of Sea Level Rise - Mercedes Vigón, Florida International U; Juliet Gill Pinto, Florida International U; Bruno Takahashi, Michigan State University; Manuel D. Chavez, Michigan State U